Artistic legacy flows on through music

An unconventional relationship with her artist father is part of Bertie Blackman's inspiration.

A portrait of a 17th-century pope who increased the political power of the Vatican and reportedly slept with his dead brother's widow seems like an unusual inspiration for an album title.

Singer-songwriter Bertie Blackman agrees Pope Innocent X has none of the violence of Irish artist Francis Bacon's distorted version of Diego Velazquez's 1650 painting, which shows the pontiff shrieking at some unseen horror.

Blackman says she choose the papal title to convey a sense of being sucked into a vortex. ''To me these songs and stories tremble on a veil between reality and imagination,'' she says.

Blackman will perform songs from her latest album as part of the Art Gallery of NSW's Summer in Soho series of artists and celebrities exploring the culture and politics of postwar Britain in connection with the gallery's Francis Bacon: five decades.

The exhibition features Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, one of more than 45 screaming pope works painted by Bacon in the 1950s and 1960s.

The ARIA Award-winning Blackman says she chose the title after recording the album because it conveyed the complex emotions explored in songs such as Shadow Chasers, about her unconventional relationship with her father, renowned artist Charles Blackman.

Each song on the album is also illustrated by Blackman, who appears to have inherited her parents' artistic sense even though she turned to drums and guitar as a teenager.

The word ''pope'' is a symbol of the spirit, while ''innocent'' reflects the album's preoccupation with lost childhood stories. Blackman says X should be read not as the Roman numeral but to show where the booty lies on a treasure map. Yet her connection to Bacon extends beyond the title of a painting that she says ''just felt right'' for her album.

Blackman's father lived in the same building as Bacon in London in the 1950s and sought to replicate Bacon's exploration of the subconscious in his School Girl series, with their subtle undertones of sex and menace.

The two artists also moved in the same social circle, with Charles Blackman telling The Age in 2006 how the leather-clad Bacon would hoist him on his shoulders in a crowded room as a party stunt.

Their friendship did not stop Blackman offering an assessment of Bacon only marginally kinder than Margaret Thatcher's description of him as ''that man who paints those dreadful pictures''. ''Francis Bacon, he was a slightly embittered man, you know,'' he told The Sun-Herald in 2000. ''He was involved in Nazi Germany and all that but he was a perfectionist painter. What was wrong with everything, he tried to make right; that was his principle in life. So his work is very severe.''

In one sense, Bertie Blackman is a conduit for her father, whose memory was damaged by years of alcohol abuse and almost erased by Korsakoff's syndrome.

Ill health has prevented Charles Blackman, now 84, from seeing the Bacon retrospective at the Art Gallery of NSW, but Blackman says her father read the exhibition catalogue voraciously when it was given to him in hospital. ''It's just wonderful watching him every time he turned a page of the book,'' she says. ''His hands gripped the page carefully as he looked at it like a little kid.''

At one stage, Blackman says her father turned to her and said: ''It's quite strange, Beatrice. Sometimes it feels like the stories I tell you happened yesterday even though they really happened 25 years ago.''

Blackman agrees that their relationship does not fit the standard template. ''I haven't had an adult conversation with him,'' she says.

The singer-songwriter says she ''invented how I'd like things to be'' with her father, who divorced her mother, the artist Genevieve de Couvreur, when she was four, and had two heart attacks and a stroke when she was 13.

Blackman says much of her knowledge of him as a father comes from her elder siblings. But she says: ''I do wish I'd been able to talk to him artist to artist.''

Despite this, Blackman says they have always had quite a soulful connection. ''I just look into his eyes and see an empathy and knowingness that is probably beyond being just father and daughter.''

Bertie Blackman performs at the Art Gallery of NSW's Summer in Soho on Wednesday.

This material is subject to copyright and any unauthorised use, copying or mirroring is prohibited.